So it did what all computers do and the hard drive decided to spin no more as of Saturday morning. I swapped it to another machine but it was indeed the drive not the power.Luckily I had backed up my photos (18,345), web pages (12,728) and music files (11,952) only a few days previously and what few photos I lost I had already uploaded to Flickr and was able to download them back to the new sparkly replacement machine. And I had backed up the main documents folder as recently as last April... ooh...
Still, what else is there other than music and photos? Oh yes... those... and those too... and those - yes alright, so I'll back this new computer up more often! After all, I do go around the country training people about risk management... [ahem!]
Windows 7 too. Ah - that means the sound recording software won't install. It was pretty old. But version 1.2 did everything I needed it to - except install on Windows 7... Oh, and the image processing software too. Paint Shop Pro v6... The new Corel PSP X2 that I bought last Christmas whacked out the entire machine and I had to take it off. I could try the new X3 - no... I'll go along with everyone else and have ordered a copy of Adobe Photo Shop. Waiting for it to arrive...
No rush because the ancient scanner (it did everything I needed it to!!!) won't work with Windows 7 either. No driver for it and no intention of making one so I gather...
Two hours spent on Sunday afternoon getting Citrix to work so I could connect to the university network on Monday morning. It does work but seems to take ages to start - there's a delay of coffee brewing proportions before the box that does nothing except say "click to continue" comes up.
And the new machine is ultra powerful. Well the memory is and the CPU is and the new gadget meters show they never go above 35% capacity but the hard drive, whilst being an impressively large one does not seem to save or read any quicker than a four year old reading Tolkein...
And my broadband is still painfully slow. It's upto 20Mb you know. I get around 300Kb which is due to the distance to the local telephone exchange which still has Big Bertha who has to rearrange her jackplugs when she sees I'm about to connect to the web. I now have a wireless connection from the PC to the router instead of the nice yellow ethernet cable. But that was faster than wireless so if ever BT sort out the infrastructure outside the house I'll be limited by the infrastructure inside the house. And by Miss Franny using the laptop to connect to QVC...
So I'm now faced with the thrill of going through the entire comics collection to check the database and add back any comics I've bought since April (not many but there again Chrissie gave me a couple of hundred...) and have a nice straight line on the graphs of Flickr and blog viewer numbers between April and October - tell you what... seeing as you are reading this anyway, can you drop me a line and tell me how many photos and blog pages you looked at with dates? Thank muchly!
Often when encountering computer problems, (perhaps that should read "when encountering computer problems often") I use the button in the top left of the keyboard, "Esc", It dosn't get me out of the room but I feel better afterward.
ReplyDeleteI keep old bits of computers in the outhouse. I find hitting one of them hard with a hammer much more satisfying than the "Esc" key...
ReplyDelete